But I’d never seen a pair of red eyes before—and I definitely would have remembered those eyes and their cruel, burning glow.

Still a little fuzzy with sleep, I got out of bed and headed toward the bathroom. Voices sounded from below, drifting up the stairs to me—low, soft, urgent. Mom must have finally made it home and was talking to Grandma. Good.

When I finished in the bathroom, I headed downstairs to the kitchen, where Mom and Grandma always had their late-night conferences over homemade hot chocolate and whatever sweet treat my grandma had baked that day.

But they weren’t in the kitchen, even though the lights were on. Weird. I didn’t hear the voices talking anymore, either, so I walked down the hallway and into the front of the house.

Grandma Frost was slumped against the front door, her hand on the knob like she’d just closed it behind someone.

“Grandma?” I whispered, a bad, bad feeling ballooning up in my stomach. “Is something wrong?”

After a moment, Grandma Frost turned to stare at me. Tears dripped down her cheeks, filling in every single wrinkle in her skin, and she suddenly looked a hundred years old.

I wasn’t psychic, not like my grandma was. I couldn’t see the future, but somehow, I knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth.

“There’s been a terrible accident,” Grandma Frost began.

I didn’t hear the rest of her words.

I had started screaming again.

The next few days—no, the next few weeks—ground by in a grief-filled haze. My mom had been in a car wreck on her way home from the police station that night. A drunk driver had come out of nowhere and T-boned her car before driving off. Supposedly, my mom had died instantly. She’d been hurt so badly in the wreck that Grandma Frost refused to let me see her body, and the casket was closed at her funeral.

Really, though, the only thing I could think about was the fact that my mom was dead—and that it was all my fault.

If only I hadn’t picked up Paige’s hairbrush after gym class, if only I hadn’t wanted to know what she was hiding, if only I hadn’t wanted to know so badly what her secret was.

If only I’d used Bethany’s hairbrush instead, none of this would have happened. I never would have seen what Paige’s stepdad was doing to her, and my mom would never have been out so late that night. My mom would have been home with me and not in the path of that stupid drunk driver.

Of course, the flip side was that Paige’s stepdad would still have been abusing her and no one would have known about it. No one would have helped Paige.

I didn’t know which idea made me sicker: my mom dying because I’d been so damn nosy, or Paige being hurt again and again because I hadn’t been. The ugly, guilty thoughts kept spinning around and around in my head, like a crazy carousel that I couldn’t stop and couldn’t get off, no matter how much I wanted to.